Every song remembered is a civilisation kept alive.
ROOTS documents, preserves and shares the living oral traditions of India — one village, one voice, one verse at a time.
We are the archivists of a civilisation that speaks, sings and remembers out loud.
For millennia, India's knowledge has travelled through voice — through lullabies whispered to sleeping children, through epics recited by torchlight, through invocations that summon the sacred. We record, translate, and return these traditions to the communities that hold them.
About the foundation
Four disciplines. One inheritance.
Documentation
Field recordings of songs, chants, ceremonies and oral epics across every state of India.
Research
Peer-reviewed publications, working papers and monographs on the country's intangible heritage.
Community
Training, fair recognition, and long-term partnerships with the artists we work with.
Preservation
An open, searchable digital archive built for the next hundred years.
Sound, script, and memory — held together.
A growing library of recordings and manuscripts from twenty-eight states. Search by state, language, community or tradition.
A country heard state by state.
Explore the geography of oral India. Every marker is a recording session, a partnership, a memory kept.
Field notes from the road.
Documenting the Last Living Storytellers of Kutch
Our field team returns with over 40 hours of newly recorded oral epics and community histories from the Rann.
A Conversation with a Pandavani Guru
On the enduring power of epic performance and its place in a changing India.
Why We Are Building an Open Archive
Notes on why intangible heritage belongs to the communities that carry it — not to institutions.
Follow the fieldwork, week by week.
Portraits from the road, unheard clips, community voices — shared as we record them.
Watch the field, one minute at a time.
Short recordings, songs and portraits — released as we return from each village.
The songs will not save themselves.
Your contribution funds a recording session, a fellowship, a manuscript rescue.